Clif and the others hurried across the deck, as did a cadet officer who had espied the conflict from afar.
“What’s up?” asked Clif, endeavoring to separate the two combatants.
“He knocked my----” began Greene, then he added, sullenly: “None of your confounded business, Clif Faraday! What right have you to interfere?”
“Still as sweet as ever, I see, Greene,” he replied, coolly. “Got the same angelic temper.”
“Here, what’s this row?” demanded the cadet officer, arriving breathlessly on the scene. “Fighting, eh? That means the mast to-morrow morning.”
He produced a book from his blouse and read aloud as he noted:
“On board U. S. S. _Monongahela_, at sea, June 22d. Fourth class cadets, Judson Greene and Motohiki Asaki, fighting on forecastle. Cadet Greene without cap and evidently the aggressor.”
“I was not the aggressor!” indignantly cried Judson. “That chump ran----”
“Cadet Greene proved insolent, and used slang,” continued the cadet officer, calmly making the entry in his book.
“Guess we’d better get out of this or we’ll be marked for breathing,” muttered Joy.
“If you will permit me to explain,” spoke up Clif, respectfully. “I saw the whole affair. It was an accident, and----”
“Cadet Faraday of the fourth class interfered with me in the performance of my duties, and failed to use ‘sir’ when addressing me,” monotonously added the officer, writing away.
The plebes exchanged glances and then beat a hasty retreat to the other side of the forecastle. The senior cadet grinned to himself, and, restoring his book to its place, swaggered aft.
“Well, that’s certainly one way of keeping even,” exclaimed Clif, with a whistle. “Did you ever see anything worse than that?”
“Humph!” grunted Joy. “It won’t be a circumstance to what we’ll do to those fellows next Saturday night. Just let them wait and see.”
“And I do no thing to Judson Greene some days,” said Trolley, doubling his fist. “I knock him eye into last Sunday. Hurray!”
That evening after supper Cadets Blakely and Ferguson were slowly pacing up and down the port side of the spar deck talking over the all-engrossing subject--the plebe’s minstrel show.
“To tell you the honest truth, Ferguson,” said the big senior, after a pause, “I don’t see how we can stop the thing without raising a lot of trouble.”